Patiently Heal You, Patiently Unreel You
by respectablealcoholic
Summary: Canon compliant up until Christmastime season 7. Bonnie suffers quietly from Kai Parker-related PTSD and Nora wants to help. Title is a lyric from "Lofticries" by Purity Ring.
1. Chapter 1

She's figured out Bonnie winces at the sound of His name.

" _Did you two ever_ …?" she asked once, and Bonnie still can't tell whether her intention was to harm or heal with that question.

Now she's three more glasses of spiked egg nog into a sexually frustrated stupor, because it's been a while, and it's been a hard year, and she's been confused, but Nora's lips unexpectedly plump and appraising against her throbbing neck make things clearer with every hard hump of her heart against her sternum.

Christmas break is usually quiet in the dorm. It's only this dark hallway that feels so loud because of the blood in her ears and the swarm of delicate feminine breaths. Not the music pumping from the common room where rages the pent-up energy of students who are avoiding their parents this holiday season. There's an orange glow at the end of the hall from the Christmas lights. She watches it ebb while she is worked on, and she believes that it lights her heart that has felt so dark since she met Him.

Even dead, He manages to snuff out who she thought she was.

"Stop thinking about him," Nora whispers against her neck.

It must be something she can sense.

"I wasn't," Bonnie says quietly, losing focus on the orange glow until her vision is kaleidoscopic.

A hand settles against her lower belly and glides timidly down, over the thin cotton of her short dress. Bonnie wants to gasp when it halts, respectfully, over her pubic bone.

She's never done this with a girl. She's never felt this with a girl.

She hasn't kissed Nora on the mouth yet but thoughts of Him have already begun to invade and it's painful, and it's obvious, and it's going to ruin her if she doesn't let someone else in. Because the last person to touch her with any intention was Him, with malice. And No, they never… She's not so damaged. She knows things could've been worse. Trauma…that's what Caroline's calling it…it can always be worse.

She peels her blurry gaze from the orange glow and, anxiously, desperately… shaking so much it rattles through her totaled nervous system and actually embarrasses her…tips her chin up to touch her lips to Nora's.

The kiss is pathetic. But Nora is forgiving. The Heretic smirks, runs her eyes back and forth between each of Bonnie's, and shakes her head.

"You're so adorable, Bonnie Bennett," she says.

She must also sense that Bonnie's too drunk for this, right now, right here. She's too enthralled by orange glows and enclosed in herself. Bad, bad memories stand on guard. She pretends not to notice but she shivers when touched in even the most innocent of ways. "Come on," the Heretic says, trailing her hand up to Bonnie's hip and pressing, urging her away from the door beneath the mistletoe. "Let's get you some caffeine."


	2. Chapter 2

songs

until the ribbon breaks - one way or another

purity ring - repetition

purity ring - sea castle

purity ring - amenamy

purity ring - shuck

king woman - burn

flume - insane

* * *

Nothing's happened since Christmas.

Holiday break went on as usual, devoid of anything that made Bonnie feel fresh air out of the classroom was needed, and when classes resumed she buried herself in studies once again. Coffee for breakfast. Liquor for dinner. Lunch, sometimes, was food. It was really only Nora who ever noticed that Bonnie was struggling and sneaky about it. But she respected her enough not to intervene in what was clearly a practice in control.

Yes. Control. That's what it's been. Because the more Bonnie believes that she can control, the pains of hunger and trauma alike, the more at peace she will someday feel. Someday.

But now it's spring break and it's been almost a year since that disastrous wedding and there's still this ticking inside her. She's stumbling in through the sliding glass door of their motel room in Fucking-Nowheresville, California. Dripping glorious chlorine water from her skin, cheap vodka from her lips, quelled anxiety from her breathy groan, "I need water."

Nora's sitting in a pretty heap of damp towels on the smoke-scented bed, drying off and brushing her pool-ratty hair while she watches an old rerun of Downton Abbey, transfixed.

Caroline and Stefan have just left the poolside for their own room, leaving Bonnie alone in the deep end with a ghost. She had wanted to swim through the night, she was so full of drunk energy, but her teal reflection and the autonomy of the water and the absence of others had her feeling haunted. She had to wade away, climb the hell out and run.

She can still see the pool through the glass door and for a second, she looks back at it. She imagines a dark silhouette climbing out, thwarted, now that she's gone. She slaps the lock down, grabs the heavy curtains from both sides and yanks them closed, clouding herself with hotel dust.

Nora looks up. "Everything alright?"

Bonnie sucks her bottom lip in between her teeth and lies in a nod. They're supposed to be at the Redwood Forest already, but some unseasonal snow in the midwest had delayed them. Rather than driving the night through, her three companions had insisted on a relaxing night in before the last leg of the drive. She wishes now they would have just taken a plane, but she and Nora were both too terrified at the prospect of a cross-country flight. It's funny, she thinks, that the Heretic is even more afraid than she is to be up in the air. After she's adjusted so well to everything else modern. She already has some couple thousand Instagram followers. But airplanes…no way.

So here they are, a hundred miles from where Bonnie really wants to be, in a crap motel off the highway with more angst than amenities.

Bonnie looks to Nora, who's already refocused on the television. She can feel the vodka running like a lubricant through her veins, carrying her weighted blood on its back from her heart. And hunger from the narrow pit in her stomach, for something cheap and disgusting like a gas station corn dog. She would even eat pork rinds, she's so hungry. _No, not those. Anything but those._ And she can feel months of suppressed curiosity about what it might feel like, Nora's hipbones rubbing against her own.

It isn't a crush. She doesn't think.

She's just been wondering, for a while now, why thinking about Nora that way makes her cheeks and chest feel flushed. No thought of another girl ever made her anxious to push it away. She has never felt threatened by her own curiosity before. It has never been authentic, or worth pushing away for the reality it might bring about. Nora is a real girl who Bonnie thinks is prettier than any other, and there is only one bed in this motel room, and it won't be the first time they've passed out intoxicated on the same mattress before but Bonnie worries that this time will be different. Her heart is feeling warmer than most nights.

She goes to the bedside table where Nora put the bottle of vodka and takes herself a healthy swig.

She is elegant; beyond grunting in horror when it burns down her throat. It tastes only like pool water to her now.

She sets the bottle back down, wipes her mouth in the crook of her elbow, holds in a dainty belch. She puts her hand over her stomach to steady a brief ripple of uncertainty in her guts. She really needs some water. Between her fore and middle fingers, she feels the tough rise of skin beneath her ribs.

She never looks down at it anymore.

Just feels it on accident sometimes.

Sometimes on purpose.

The scar feels like an epitaph on the headstone of her body. It reads in the language of ripped up flesh:

 _I once was His, and now here lie._

When she's feeling optimistic, the scar is just an artifact of something else she's survived.

In the grand scope of her lazarus years, it's nothing special.

So why does she still feel so _marked?_

So…incomplete?

It's as if instead of blowing her through the air, He had intimately thrust His hand through her chest and taken hold of her heart to tear out, but never finished the job. She can still feel the squeezing. Breath-taking pumps. Fingernails cutting aortic plush. Sometimes she wheezes. But the kill is always and forever half-assed. She blames Damon for saving her.

Nora's laughter jerks Bonnie out of the abyss. She glances at the Heretic, so entertained.

"Hand me that, will you?" Nora giggles, holding her hand out, still looking at the screen and not at Bonnie, who hands her the vodka bottle and a piece of her heart, unnoticed.

After a few moments distracted by the show, it hits commercial and Bonnie remembers herself. Her physical self. She is still thirsty, and wet, and freezing in the air flow of the room's powerful swamp cooler.

"You're at it again, Bonnie Bennett," Nora coos gently. The girls meet eyes, and one pair is glossy, and one pair is concerned.

"Hm?" Bonnie says dreamily, noticing that she's begun to shiver.

Nora laughs, "Come back to Earth. Are you just going to stand there all night? You're drenched."

Bonnie inhales, nods and tries to shake off her mood.

"Are you drunk?"

"Myeah," Bonnie says for certain, and then giggles without meaning to. Because she's drunk, and it's funny. She clambers into the bed and tries to quiet herself down, only to giggle in whispers that make her laugh harder. Nora joins her and the giggles get louder, until they begin to shush each other, and both girls are swaying in an ab workout on their knees, bouncing with dumb joy, cycling through the harder laughter that the shushing creates, and at last Bonnie is wiping hot tears from her eyes. Downton Abbey has come back on, but Nora isn't paying attention anymore. She's smiling with a glazed contentment over her eyes while she watches Bonnie recover from the fit of vodka-induced ecstasy. When Bonnie realizes she's being admired, she decides that now is the time to satisfy her curiosity. It could be the so-called liquid courage boiling in her belly but she feels that it will be right, and nothing could change for the worse, if she kisses her friend now.

It's happening before her brain tells her to make it so. She's leaned in closer to Nora's face, and though her eyes are half closed she can tell that Nora's are still wide open, viewing all they can of this. Maybe she has been waiting for this. Maybe she wants to savor. And when Bonnie brushes the Heretic's lips with hers, a light breath escapes, accidentally, in the pleasure of mere skin contact.

Bonnie's heart is running wild. Despite that crushing from imagined fingers, it beats so hard and recklessly.

Nora's lips encapsulate hers. They're really soft; she remembers that about them. Misses it like she could not have known.

Maybe what it is about Nora is that she pays attention. Like no other friend Bonnie has had, Nora is perceptive to her. Every feeling, every change in physical appearance, every move she makes. Bonnie feels, not studied, but known. Inside and out, even though Nora doesn't actually _know_ everything about her.

And it's not like Christmas this time. Bonnie has had plenty to drink, sure. But she feels no hesitation. She feels no nipping doubt in the back of her mind that she wants to touch and be touched by this person. And so she puts her hand on the side of Nora's face, embeds her fingertips through her hairline, feels the silk that grows from her pretty head from its roots to its ends. Nora mimics her.

Bonnie leans back and lets her head fall on the pillows. Nora follows, lying at her side, kissing while she runs her fingertips from the ends of Bonnie's hair to her sternum, between the wet band of her dark blue bikini top, drawing a line with her French manicured nail down the center of Bonnie's ribcage. Bonnie sucks in a sharp breath, _it tickles_ , her empty belly falling concave.

Nora pushes off from her mouth with a plump kiss and glides down to plant a new kiss over her diaphragm. Bonnie lifts her head enough to look down and watch Nora smirking up at her. She half expects to get bit. She forgets sometimes that Nora drinks blood, and remembers only in crucial moments like this when her mouth full of fangs is too close. But this time it does not make her uneasy. In fact, she doesn't know if she will ever feel unease in Nora's presence again. She's been such a comfort the last several months. An arguable soulmate for the weird bond they've formed.

Nora kisses her way down Bonnie's shivering skin, all the while the tips of her smooth fingernails draw slow parallel lines down her sides. When she reaches the band of her bikini bottom, Bonnie hopes she is drunk enough not to flinch like some kind of virgin.

She does anyway.

Nora smiles and burrows her top teeth beneath the nylon, gripping on the outer side with her bottom teeth. She bites and drags the swim piece, with admirably little difficulty, down Bonnie's hips, down her thighs. Bonnie helps, quivering while she bends her knees up and lets the piece fall down her shins and off from her feet.

Her bottom is bare on the dirty comforter of a hotel bed and another woman is hovering over her free cunt. It's new.

She feels Nora's long damp hair skimming the tops of her thighs, mingling in her mound as she lowers her head.

Bonnie can't just lie there; she needs to do something with her hands. Not only to seem as into this as she feels, but to keep herself from imploding with nervous energy.

She reaches down and smooths her hands over the jutting shoulder bones in Nora's back. Nora's lips descend upon her cunt and Bonnie claws at the tie on Nora's bikini top until it comes loose, no real concentration having gone into the untying. Palm tree breast cups fall onto her legs and she can feel Nora's nipples hard against her thighs, the warm flesh of her breasts pressing as she relaxes her weight between Bonnie's legs and her tongue slides in between her folds.

Bonnie gasps.

Her hands fly up to her mouth.

All the electricity in the room pops. TV is black and silent. All the lamps have gone out.

Nora laughs.

Bonnie digs her nails into her own cheeks, bites the heel of her right hand.

Nora's tongue flicks her clit.

She wants to scream.

Almost furious, she grabs the pillow from underneath her head and hugs it over her face, fading into the darkness. She intends to suffocate the steady slew of moans that arrive as Nora adopts a rhythm of licks from clit to vagina, spreading her hole a little bit wider each time she tongues down. By the heat and heart beat collecting in the deepest reaches of her gut, she knows that her cunt is producing as much moisture as saliva in Nora's mouth. Both wetnesses meeting makes her feel like she's swimming in oil.

Her entire body is so tense; she's going to be in pain tomorrow. To ease her muscles, she falls into Nora's rhythm and lifts her pelvis, just a little bit, each time the warm wet muscle slips inside her body.

It feels so good.

 _And no one ever…_

 _Nothing ever…_

It isn't right.

When Nora stops, she feels betrayed. She wonders what she's done to deserve losing that good feeling.

She rips the pillow from her face and looks to the Heretic, panting, pleading, beseeching. Nora's on her knees, peeling off her pretty pink, white, brown and green palm tree bikini bottom. Getting naked.

So it isn't over.

Bonnie sighs, and wants to be just as naked. She does a quick crunch and folds her arm around to unhook the back of her top. By the time she succeeds, Nora is ready to help slide the straps from her arms, and then they're naked together. Bonnie lies back again and Nora hovers just a hair over her, nipples teasing her own. This alone is a pleasure Bonnie didn't know existed, and she's glad to have found it, arching her back to press her breasts against Nora's.

She kisses her, tasting her own cunt on her lips, on her tongue. Just to get what she wanted, she precedes things with a quick roll of her naked hipbones against Nora's, then she lets her fingers explore. And she doesn't know why it intimidates her. It's a mirror image of her own body. But she can't feel what she's doing like Nora can, and wants to do it well. She can only judge herself by the look on Nora's face.

She dips her middle finger beneath the hood of Nora's cunt. The Heretic grins and bites her lip gently. Bonnie takes that as a good sign. She lets her finger slide down between the lips, smooth because Nora waxes and is hairless.

Her inside feels much like her own. Cavernous and slippery, warm and responsive. Bonnie hooks her finger and wiggles it, balancing her grip with the underside of her knucklebone on Nora's nub. She stretches room for a second finger and then her hand gets pulled away.

Nora grins slyly as she gives Bonnie's hand back to her and hikes up a knee. She lowers her cunt onto Bonnie's, and Bonnie feels glossy lips intersect with hers, and Nora thrusts her hips to rub their sexes together. She hears their wetnesses sticking and slipping.

So this is sex with Nora.

Bonnie sighs and smiles and gets a kiss on the tip of her nose.

It's all perfect and pleasurably lasting until something…a nipple, or maybe it's hair, or her own absentminded fingers wet and wandering… glides innocently over Bonnie's scar.

Her epitaph.

Her artifact.

Memento.

Monument.

Portal.

She gasps.

Movement halts.

She tries to play it cool. She did not mean to give pause.

Or did she? She's drunk and horny and can't really tell.

All she knows is that she's been touched there, and it calls upon memories of He who made that mark.

She breathes out and smells the vodka on her breath. She feels Nora's cunt blossoming against her, aching in unison with hers for more.

But she asks, "What is it?"

Bonnie shakes her head and murmurs, "Nothing. Just keep going, I'm fine."

Beneath the skinny Heretic, Bonnie moves her body to get things started again, but Nora only watches her. She tries not to make eye contact, because she knows what she's going to find.

Perception.

"You're thinking about him."

Caught, Bonnie stills.

"Who?"

"Oh, Bonnie."

"…I'm not. I wasn't…"

Nora bows her head and leaves a gentle kiss to Bonnie's chest as she sits up, bony knees digging into the mattress around Bonnie's left thigh, cunts still thankfully attached. She sits and looks down at her pensively. She doesn't seem disappointed; just intensely curious.

"You never slept with him," she says.

Fright spikes through Bonnie's heart, and she shakes her head adamantly No.

"…Did you ever want to?"

As with previous thoughts of Nora's hips banging against hers, His come to mind and Bonnie's cheeks and chest ignite to blushing shame.

" _No_ ," she insists, voice cracking. It sounds convincing, and she remains sure of that No. The things He did to her. The things He did to Elena and to Alaric. The things they have all lost because of Him. Friends. Family. Hope of ever finding peace in anything but death.

Nora fingers her long hair behind her ears, considering Bonnie.

"Are you sure? There was never a moment, or even a second, when you looked at him and even had the smallest thought in the back of your head that he was…kind of cute?"

"Am I sure?" Bonnie wants to laugh, but the vodka in her system is taking her down for a hard crash and the high is gone. "Yeah, I'm absolutely sure."

But she remembers this fleeting attraction she had mere moments before she knew the truth about Him. In 1994. He was testing her. He was flirting. She had not reread the news yet. She touched His chest.

And Nora sees the doubt in her eyes as they travel aside in guilt. She is piercing, searching in earnest for the truth she already knows.

"Fine," Bonnie says, crooking her jaw as she lets Nora's gaze in. "Maybe I did. Ok? But I was stuck in that fucking prison world for four _months_ with Damon. Alone. And when it turned out there was someone else, I was relieved. And yeah, I'm not blind. He wasn't ugly. I might have flirted with him for .2 seconds. It was nice to not be alone. He brought hope. He said he could get us out, and _all I wanted_ was to get out. For one day," Bonnie steadies herself and breathes, "I liked him."

Then she shakes her head at herself for admitting this to another person, when she had struggled enough in admitting it to herself. Bile wants to rise in her throat. But her cunt still throbs at Nora's.

"I shouldn't tell you this," Nora says cautiously.

Bonnie notices she's been fingering absentminded circles over her scar, and stops immediately.

"Tell me what?"

"In 1903. When you left him there."

Bonnie clenches her molars.

"He talked about you like…"

"Like what?"

"Like he hated you. But it wasn't a normal hatred."

"Nothing about him was normal."

"True, but… You say he tried to kill you, that night, after the wedding."

"He almost succeeded. If Damon hadn't—"

"He wouldn't have finished."

"Sorry?"

Nora looks down and picks up a strand of Bonnie's hair, admiring for a moment before she lets it go.

"I wasn't there. But I know that his plan wasn't to kill you."

Bonnie hesitates to ask, "Then…what was?"

"He was going to put you in your own prison world."

"What?" Bonnie begs, worrying that this choking feeling in her throat means she's about to tear up. But she controls herself well.

"He didn't have an ascendant yet. …He talked about forcing you to help him make your own hell. …He talked about a lot of things. Things he was going to do to you for betraying him. …But killing you wasn't one of them."

The very idea that someone had hated her so much they thought she deserved an eternity of isolation. It's a little bit unbearable, and it shocks her to hear this unfulfilled part of His plan so much later than its failure. She's glad He failed, but she knows that if He hadn't, she would rather He just killed her than kept her His prisoner.

Nora scrunches her features, apparently just as disgusted with the notion as Bonnie is, and Bonnie feels sorry that Nora has to tell it.

"He said that he wanted you to suffer in the same way you made him suffer. But that maybe he would visit you sometimes. Just to hear you beg him for your release."

"God."

"He was a sick person."

"Why me? What did I do to deserve that? I did nothing that he didn't do to me first."

Nora lifts her eyebrows, shrugs and if Bonnie isn't mistaken there's a twitch of an almost smile.

"I have a theory," Nora says.

"What?"

"It's obvious."

"What is it?"

"I think that he hated you so much because…because he didn't hate you."

Bonnie frowns and tries not to shiver.

"Don't say that."

"I'm saying it because it's true. You can tell things about a person when you're trapped with them. I fed on him. I tasted his darkness. He wanted you. And he didn't know what to do with that."

"Even if you're right, what's your point?"

"My point is…maybe you can't shake him because there's some part of you that wonders."

 _Wonders what?_ Bonnie wants to ask, but she knows what Nora means. She just wants to hear it spoken out loud. Maybe because Nora's right.

There's some part of her that wonders what might've happened if they were stuck in 1994 a little bit longer.

There's some part of her that wonders what might've happened if she had been nicer at Thanksgiving dinner.

There's some part of her that wonders what might've happened if she had believed Him when He said He had changed.

Why He stuttered when He apologized to her.

Why He was being so nice in the cave, before she screwed Him over and sent her magic away.

What He was thinking about when He had her neck in His hands from the backseat of the Camaro.

Why He tricked her into touching His chest.

How long He was watching her before He wrote _YELLOWLEDBETTER_ in her crossword, and what He saw.

Why He seemed so upset when He thought Damon was going to let her die…

Bonnie does wonder. Obsessively.

But these curiosities are all as savage to her psyche as a swim in spacetime. She cannot change the past and she can never know the infinitude of circumstances in parallel universes. She lives in this universe. He was a bad person. She survived Him. The end.

"You're thinking about it now," Nora observes.

"I hate that I can't get him out of my head. It's wrong. He's dead. I should be able to accept that but I'm always afraid because it feels—"

"Like he's still here?"

"Yeah."

"For what? Of all the people he could choose to haunt, why you?"

"I don't know."

"Did you ever see that 1990's movie Casper?"

"Of course," Bonnie wants to laugh, but feels too sick.

"You know all that stuff about unfinished business?"

Goose bumps break out all over her naked skin.

"I feel him following me everywhere I go."

"Do you ever consider you might be the one with the unfinished business?"

The air in the motel room feels vaporous with a haunting, suddenly, and Bonnie thinks that the dark silhouette from the pool has finally found its way in through the crack in the sliding glass door.

It smells like chlorine.

It smells like mold.

Nora sighs, "I want to try something."

Bonnie reaches for the vodka bottle on the bedside table and Nora allows her one generous gulp. She needs this, and she wishes it still burned the way it used to.

"Close your eyes."

Bonnie clenches her teeth and does as she is told, despite the screaming in her nerves to keep alert for the dark, dripping ghost that's just crept in. She remembers these close-your-eyes games of pretend when she was a kid with her two best friends.

 _Light as a feather, stiff as a board._

"I want to help you," Nora says gently, and Bonnie can feel her leaning forward again. Their breasts touch and their cunts worm together and she's back in that state of mind that she needs to move, to touch, to come.

"Do you trust me?"

Bonnie has never felt more positive than when she trembles, nods her chin and says, "Yes."

 _Crack an egg on your head, let the yolk run down._

"Keep your eyes closed."

Nora's mouth travels to her neck and while she's pivoting her hips, she's kissing thudding skin.

Alone behind her eyelids, Bonnie just wants to hit her peak and disappear into a deep sleep devoid of dreams, and she hopes that Nora is going to help her do that. She hopes that the orgasm will be of some therapy in itself. She hasn't slept with anyone for a while now. She's rarely even helped herself in the last year or so.

Maybe all of her trauma is made worse by pent up sexual frustration. She hasn't thought about that.

"I'm going to ask you to do something," Nora whispers, lips moving against her fragile ear bones.

"K…"

"Think of him."

"What?" Bonnie jerks, throwing her eyes open, appalled.

Nora lifts her head, only to look down at Bonnie with eyes half open. The exchange of looks amounts to nothing more than the sense of moderate ease. Bonnie can't tell if she's under a spell or if the atmosphere in Nora's presence really is that calming. Either way, the Heretic brushes two fingers over her eyelids like a corpse and she closes them once again.

"Think of him," she says again, settling back into warm breaths at her neck, kissing softly.

There is nothing Bonnie can do in her own mind except recall Him. She doesn't know what in particular Nora wants her to think about, but her mind does the legwork in memories. He's fingering the tip of a knife with beady eyes on her. He's in a dark hallway with flashes of lasers and loud, loud music and He's got His eyebrows in the strangest furrow while He looks at her for the first time since He abandoned her. He's in a tux and it's a standoff and He's bleeding profusely at the neck, realizing with His eyes dead set on hers that He can siphon the werewolf venom from His wound; that He can win.

These memories at the front of her mind while sexual hormones are running wild through her body confuses her. It's terror and titillation.

"If he's a ghost, is he here in this room?"

" _Yes_."

"Why?"

" _He wants to hurt me_."

"Shh," Nora coos in her ear. "Maybe not."

" _No, he does. He just wants to haunt me, he just wants to watch me suffer_ —"

"Shh. You have to be optimistic, Bonnie. He tried to earn your forgiveness once. Your forgiveness was something that he wanted. He wanted it so much, he bargained and got himself left behind. Think of that."

"Why?"

Nora's voice pauses before she answers carefully, "I want you to forgive him."

Bonnie is taken aback.

"No."

"He's dead. You can't hold him to all the pain he caused you forever. You're only hurting yourself."

"What are you, a psychologist now?"

"Taking Psych 101," Nora laughs a little, "So trust me. Nothing good will come of holding on to hating him."

Bonnie huffs.

"I want you to forgive him, and then forgive yourself."

"I can't."

"I have faith in you," Nora whispers sensually into her neck. "So let's say it's true. He's a ghost and he's here. But he can't harm you. I want you to picture him standing in this room, don't open your eyes."

"Right now?" Bonnie asks, feeling more naked than ever before. Even though He was there before Nora pretended He was.

Nora must hear the fear in her voice, because she says, "Remember, he can't harm you."

Bonnie feels like she's suffocating. The air is so wet. Nora clamps her lips onto her neck and sucks skin, swiveling her hips again, encouraging her cunt to splay for her, and for the pregnant room when she lifts herself.

" _Say his name_ ," Nora whispers against her heart as she slinks down the bed.

Bonnie doesn't want to. The concept is more sinful than murder, right now. She's naked, aroused, an exhibit for a supposed ghost, and asked to speak His name aloud. It's silly but she thinks it will be taking a risk of resurrection.

Will He rise to the sound of His name?

Will He, from Hell, attend?

Because if anyone's soul has ever been unsheathed and warped into a demonic force, it will be His.

Something fits into the ache between her thighs. A knuckle.

" _Say his name_."

Her hips burn from point to point, for depth of the next thing that triangulates them. She wants more.

She puts her teeth together to form it.

" _Khh—_ " she begins timidly and quiets. She can't do this.

"Go on, it will be ok."

The knuckle slides up against her clit for a second before going back down to the too-shallow waiting area at her entrance. Her legs tense up. Her lungs spasm. Her heart is frantic. The ghost is waiting.

" _Kai_ ," Bonnie breathes, so incredibly ashamed of herself.

But she finds relief when Nora's finger extends inside her, and she moans. The finger makes a few slow revolutions that widen her, and now she only wants another. Two fingers. Three fingers. Anything with more girth, because it isn't enough, and the sound of His name off her lips has made her static with anxiety.

" _Again_ ," Nora's voice hums at her belly button.

Bonnie swallows and braces herself for another wave of guilt but she will do anything now for more. And then there's this sick thing in her that thirsts to say it again because that guilt…there's something about it…it seduces. And the dripping ghost at the foot of the bed has leaned in, its fingers gnarling into the comforter, its back arched as it listens with terrifying excitement, heaving, poised to come closer.

" _Kai_ …" Bonnie shudders.

Two skinny fingers now dig into her cunt.

She is thinking of Him.

It is not what she wanted, to think of Him. But now that she is, she feels stricken with a kind of epiphany.

What has she become?

The heat has claimed the flesh of her cheeks and chest and will not go away with time.

" _That's good_ ," Nora whispers down the flat of skin towards her working fingers. Bonnie tries to hold onto her shoulders but she slips out of reach, saying, " _One more time_."

What good will it do, Bonnie wonders, to chant the name of her demon in euphoria? It can only raise Hell, and it surely will.

But Nora's tongue joins her fingers in giving pleasure, lapping at her clit while her fingers swirl, and in her own private darkness Bonnie can't quit the erecting thought of…

" _Kai_ ," she moans this time, thrusting her rib cage at the air.

Thrice His name has now been spoken and she fears that Nora will not ask her to say it again.

But the fantasy is alive. He is there and He is not unwanted. She thinks of what He might have looked like underneath his stupid shirts. She wonders if He was good at sex, or if He ever even… She thinks of His eyes. That little amount of stubble that was finally allowed to grow once He escaped to the real world. He was a horror of man, but beneath it all, nonetheless, He was a man. It's weird to realize it. He acted so childishly much of the time she knew Him. But He had the thing that made Him male, and He probably used it. She wonders if He thought of her when He used it. When He was alone. When physical stress built up inside Him like it did in her, and something had to be done to release that stress.

Bonnie realizes Nora's fingers have slipped out and her tongue has taken over completely. It licks more violently than before. More recklessly. Less precise.

She doesn't know what happened to the body heat. Aside from her own hot spell, the damp air down there has grown cold and she wishes they were underneath the blanket.

The tongue hits a particularly nervous point of flesh inside her and she twitches, moans, and reaches down to cradle Nora's skull.

And she jolts when she feels how short the hair is.

Her eyes pop open and her body wrenches upward, just enough to get a better look at what is happening to her. She blinks and rubs her eyes with vibrating hands, rubbing her lips and clawing at her cheekbones in utter horror at the thing moving between her thighs.

"Shh," she hears, and sees Nora stepping back from the bed, naked and angular, shrinking into the shadows that have grown so much blacker than she remembers. An unspeakable darkness has enshrouded the motel room.

 _Don't leave me here_ , she wants to scream but she can't find her voice.

She watches the pale shoulders heave up and down with the breaths it takes.

 _He_ takes.

She recognizes the shape of Him. The silhouette.

His violent tongue scrapes around in her slit and dips down, deep, deeper than she thinks is normal, and this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong, but she can't help that it feels good and she can't stop the groan of disgusted enjoyment. _What is happening what is happening what is happening?_

He looks up at the sound and His cold blue eyes meet hers, and He's so real, she doesn't know how, but she is seeing Him smirk that classic smirk, feeling His skin as solid and electric as Nora's, hearing Him breathe in amusement while He watches her watching Him making her weep for Him.

It has to be an illusion.

It can't be a ghost. The Other Side is gone.

Whatever it is, whatever _He_ is, Bonnie replaces her hands where she wanted them.

In His hair.

She's aware, acutely, of Nora lounging in the armchair in the shadowed corner of the room, watching with eyes wide open. Bonnie wants to believe that she won't let anything bad happen to her, but this magic is dark and she doesn't know what to believe anymore.

 _Are you real,_ she wants to ask the illusion Himself.

 _Have you been haunting me_ , she wants to ask the ghost.

 _Have you been wanting me_ , she wants to ask the man.

But her mouth is stuck half open in shock, still. For self assurance, she digs her nails into His scalp. He feels quite breakable. Skin builds underneath her fingernails. Grease coats her palms. She wonders where He bathes in Hell.

His hurting hands spider up her body as He drags Himself along her, His bare chest looming, demon tongue trailing like a slug up her pubic bone,

her belly,

her scar, and she is awed,

her ribs,

her heart,

her trachea,

her chin,

her lip,

her teeth.

She is hesitant to let Him into her mouth but she looks with wild terror into His terrible eyes and feels compelled to have Him. He melts His mouth over hers, persistent tongue slithering in pattern from the bottom of hers to the tip to the back to the tip to the throat to the tip and over again. His body rocks gently like a rowboat on dead water. She wonders if this is exactly what it would have been like to give herself to Him then.

She scratches that.

She knows this is what it would have been like.

Because this is it.

Something begs at her opening and she knows when that smooth arrowhead spreads her that this is as real as it can ever get. She has come to the point of no return.

He injects Himself into her body and where there were inadequate tongues and fingers now lies the heaviest of burdens. His demon dick is the American flag on the moon. It does not belong where it is, but her body quakes apart for it anyway.

It slides in until she cringes and He is wholly within her; He makes little thrusts until her cunt relinquishes its qualms and it doesn't hurt anymore; He retracts His tongue from her esophagus and moans headily. She hears His voice behind His breath and cannot believe how true it is, how true He is to what He was.

Except for the desperation with which He looks into her eyes now.

It's the rave all over again.

 _Um…I wanted…to apologize…for anything I did…that hurt you._

She wishes He would say that now.

He looks so helpless while He fucks.

He's losing Himself.

She lets herself lay hands on His cold skin, on His back, and feels Him shaking.

It's not like a demon to tremble.

She holds his precious, apologetic face and his stubbly jaw also trembles.

He is just as nervous to be taking her and she is to be taken by Him.

And for being so humble, she wants to reward him with her forgiveness. She does.

Still she keeps it.

" _Kai_ ," she hears herself saying instead, because something must be uttered in the name of consummation. " _Kai_."

Nora moans from the shadows.

Why won't He speak? She wants to hear her name on His tongue, in His voice.

But He answers to His own name in panting. At least there is that. Before she knows it He's pumping away and she is His, but He feels just as much like hers in how he grunts for her, and the desire is mutual and it is cathartic and she doesn't think she will ever again _wonder._

Bonnie clings to his shoulders, rocking up against him harder than he does to her. When her time comes, he follows. Her body swallows him and a pool of moaning warmth.

Nora in the darkness squeaks her simultaneous arrival. Bonnie adores the sound.

Kai buries a kiss on the side of her neck, and it is sweet. She feels like the hand on her heart has let go. She wants to listen to music. She wants to go back to the pool. She wants to sleep underneath Him, to keep smelling this sooty scent she picks up on His skin when she grazes her teeth across His shoulder. She wants to hold Him by the horns when she fucks Him again. Her demon.

Feminine whispers trill from across the room. Bonnie thinks she's heard the sunrise birds but it still feels like three in the morning. The room is black as pitch save only for the lampposts that surround the pool and leak through weak spots in the curtains.

She can't make out the quiet little words purling from Nora's corner.

He screeches.

It's so loud she doesn't hear it at first. But then he is convulsing on top of her in a squall of deafening screams that sound as inhuman as He must be.

And then an immeasurable weight has been lifted from her body.

He is gone.

Bonnie bolts upright, aware of how wild her moist hair must look to the other woman in the room, who is sauntering nude from her chair back into bed.

"What just happened?" Bonnie needed to know.

Nora only grins evilly as she climbs into the sweat-dank patch of blanket between Bonnie's legs.

"Was it an illusion?"

Nora laughs. She smells like sex.

"Is that what you'd prefer to hear?"

Bonnie can't decide what the truth is. All she knows is that Kai is gone, that she feels something like _better_ , and that she wants to lie down with Nora while she attempts to wrap her mind around what the literal Hell just happened.

"Did you see it?" she whispers.

Nora shrugs and dips her head down to Bonnie's used cunt. Her warm tongue enters and strokes a few times. And though she's just had the ride of a lifetime, Bonnie thinks she can handle more. But then Nora emerges with her lips closed in a sort of pucker, and she's leaning in toward Bonnie's face. Bonnie accepts an aromatic kiss, and another gift.

Nora passes some kind of runny, salty clot onto Bonnie's tongue, and she wants to gag. But she stays strong, and kisses back while the muscles in her mouth urge the curd towards the back of her throat.

She realizes after she's already swallowed it that it was cum. And that she's shaking still.

"Nora," she murmurs, "…How?"

Nora turns her pretty lips up into a smirk.

"Magic."

"But…"

"Have you forgiven him?"

Bonnie licks her lips in uncertainty while she paces her breath and her heart.

"…Maybe," she finally decides.

Nora sighs in relief.

"I'm so glad," she says with a bright smile.

Bonnie suspects that Nora has her own reasons for helping her shake off Kai Parker's ghost. But she can appreciate whatever those selfish reasons are without knowing them.

It is in selfishness, after all, that Bonnie wants to forgive Kai. Whatever it was that came into the room and laid with her, whether it was an illusion of Him, or a ghost of Him, or a demon of Him, He cannot just fuck the forgiveness out of her. And he can never earn it, because it isn't for him. She has decided that her forgiveness will be for herself. And she will give it freely.

Because now, she is free.


End file.
